How long should your videos be?

Green Spark’s video producer, Jim Cliff, discusses the best length for your marketing videos to get the most engagement on YouTube.

*Transcript*

What’s the best length for an online video? I’m going to give you the definitive answer, so stick around.

Hi, I’m Jim from Green Spark. One of the most common questions that people ask about videos is ‘how long should my video be?’ There’s a really simple answer to that question, it should be as long as it needs to be to get your message across and no longer.

That can vary quite a lot. Sometimes if your message is about something which needs to be going to in-depth or is very detailed people will watch a longer video because they want that information they want all that detail, but for the most part videos need to be as brief as they can be and I, practically speaking, try to keep mine under two minutes.

People tend to be very fickle online, they will watch something and then if their interest drops at all they’ll skip to another video straight away and there’s a lot of distractions that they have online so you need to keep it brief.

People will watch more than one video in a series of videos if they’re finding them interesting. So while they may not actually sit down and watch a 10-15 minute video they will watch five or ten 2 minute videos if it’s keeping their interest so if you’ve got a longer thing to talk about and it’s not all completely one subject then try to split up into smaller videos and you’ll probably get more engagement that way.

I’m not gonna take up any more of your time so thanks very much for watching and I’ll see you next time

There are loads of different ways to use video to market your business there’s a lot of ways that people don’t always think about so why not have a look at our free guide here you can download it and maybe it’ll give you some ideas about how to market your business better with video